And he shall serve him forever.
by harpyelian
Summary: Kira and Katou shoplift: Setsuna's ears get pierced. Warning: drug use, swearing, mild gore. Hints of shounen ai, if you're so minded to see them.


The following is a work of **fanfiction**, and mine. The character(s) and worlds depicted within it are, however, not in any way mine: the world of Angel Sanctuary was invented by Yuki Kaoru and belongs to Hana to Yume comics, or something.

  


...And he shall serve him forever.

_Then his master shall bring him unto the judges; he shall also bring him to the door, or unto the door post; and his master shall bore his ear through with an aul; and he shall serve him forever._  
Exodus 21:6 (King James Bible).

Katou was stoned, and poking at the belt with an open pair of scissors was only serving to cut into the side of hs palm. Every so often he would swear and drop the scissors, then fumble for them on the floor and begin again until tiny streaks of red covered the usual lines there: lines Kira could see as if magnified hundreds of times. Kira could see the smallest things when he had been bunning, could stare into broken computers and travel down the labyrinths of their microchips, could watch weeds growing nanometre by nanometre and once, even, the angels jiving on the head of a generic pin, a respectably repressed distance between them as they picked their feet up faster and faster like live chickens on a hotplate. He had crushed them, laughing, and they squealed in return, and then Katou had shoved against him and demanded to know what was so funny. Katou could never stand to be left out of a joke.

They had kept straight faces earlier that day in the clothes shop - no, _boutique_, or _tailor's_, or whatever foriegn name it had chosen in order to place itself in an elitist bracket (which is like a hinge bracket, or a wall bracket, and stray splinters spike under your nails if it is not polished enough). Increasing his slouch proportionately to the assistants' disapproval, Kira had fingered pinstripe blazers and met their dead-eyed stares as they flustered up to wipe the handled lapels with their handkerchiefs. They were just waiting for an excuse to throw them out: and when Katou came out of the changing rooms and tossed aside some well-cut designer suit that had suited him ill, they sped into action. Converging in a flock to politely force Kira and Katou out of the door and wave in more appropriate customers, they never heard the quiet thuds as removed security tags dropped from the jacket to the floor.

Outside, Kira had lit up and then settled himself on a convenient bench. Katou had stood before him, head to the side and grinning, and pulled silk ties and ladies' scarves from his pockets like some kind of lapsed conjuror: they had floated over air resistance while Kira grabbed them from the air before they touched the ground. Clean, they could be sold to the some market trader with less morals than taste, and pay their way to the next eighth at least. Katou complained about sharing it equally, but then Katou was a whiny fuck who would have been caught in no time had Kira not been there to draw attention away from him, and who would have never learnt to open the catches on security tags on his own. Katou thought he could just grab and run: Katou was stupid that way. Katou was also stupid enough to still have the blade of the scissors pressing into his hand, and at this rate he'd slash up his hand properly and get blood _everywhere_.

"Oh, for fuck's sake." Kira stretched out a hand and dragged the belt from the Katou's loose grasp. "Give it here."

"I can't: you've already got it." Katou grinned and then began to lift his hands in some signal of no-offence-intended, although he gave up halfway and let them fall again as he watched Kira's hands trail along the black surface. "Didn't know you had such a leather fetish, Kira..." Katou was not only a stupid fuck, he was a stupid fuck with a crap sense of humour. Kira threw a can at him and did not have to turn to hear the thunk as it collided with the other's head, nor the cry as Katou discovered there had in fact been a good inch of drink at the bottom which was now soaking through his trousers.

Kira flicked on his lighter and stared at the flame. "You should watch out for those little accidents, Katou." 

One-handed, he extracted a small half-blade piece of metal from the swiss army knife in front of him, and held it at the very top of the grey cone. He had learnt _something_ from Chemistry, at least.

"...Kira?"

The heated blade - _no, awl, said some pocket of knowledge at the back of his brain_ - went through the leather slickly, and Kira twisted it. It felt somehow wrong, as if there was another way it was supposed to give, although Kira could not think what that was supposed to be. It was not as if he had ever done this before, was it?

He tossed the belt back. "It'll fit now. Why d'you lift it if it was too big for you, anyway?" And an idea came to him.

***

Setsuna bitched as he held the ice cube to his ear, it was obvious from his tone: the words themselves were unimportant. Kira was not listening to them, too concerned with trying to prevent the skewer from getting covered with the black shit that always came from flame. Had he not been concentrating on that, he might have wondered about the earrings that sat in a bath of TCP in front of him. They had appeared in his desk drawer just like the idea in his mind, maybe, from that uncertain dark place that always seemed to shimmer at the tips of Kira's fingers when his mouth was coated with the brown fuzz of too much Northern Lights, or was it too many Northern Lights? 

Kira shoved Setsuna up against the doorpost: wood would be able to take the skewer driving into it better than the plaster, which had in part collapsed over Katou last week when he struck the wall in a flurry of dancing limbs. Whoever had owned the house before it became a squat had been pretty fucking remiss with the repairs, and let the walls and ceilings sag with age and damp: other rooms were worse, their ceilings completely gone after a few semi-squatparties on the floor above. Plaster covered Katou's schoolbag with an ironic off-white powder, which clung even now to Kira's trousers as he knelt in front of Setsuna and smelt the thin sourness of vodka on his breath.

"Getting him drunk first so you can have your way with him, eh?" Katou would have asked had he been here, had he not immediately gone for Setsuna's throat like a territorial tomcat to a stray, had Kira enlightened him to what would be going on after he had thrown him out. And Katou would have leered, annoyingly, and shoved one adidias-classic'd foot in the door when Kira tried to close it, and left unwanted questions about why Kira even bothered with that little fucker, was he that good? hanging in in air between them. And then Kira could laugh and praise Katou's jealousy, forcing him into quiet or mumbled disagreement. Sometimes, Katou was very easy to deal with.

It was only when Kira caught the white of Setsuna's eye staring panicked at him that he realised he was unnecessarily pushing the other's neck back into the post. He slipped it up to pull the earlobe flat and tried to ignore the way the head lolled against his hand: he had misjudged the level of alcohol Setsuna could take, forgotten how very sheltered the boy really was. The pain should sober him up, though, however sharpened the skewer had been and however numbing the cold of the ice was. Before he could think to delay, Kira drew back the hammer to knock the skewer through Setsuna's skin, and hit.

The first hole was made in a fizz and crack of melting ice, and the skewer embedded itself in the doorpost and had to be prised out, jerking inside the hole and teasing a thin trail of blood from the ear. So much for the heat cauterising the blood vessels, and so much for a small diameter: the earring was so loose in the new hole it almost fell out before it was shut, splashing disinfectant. Setsuna whimpered beneath him, one of his hands clutching convulsively on Kira's throuserleg, and Kira could not look down but bit his lip and readied his hand for the next blow. 

It felt like it took a year in all, one year or seven or all of his life with the younger boy crumpling against the doorpost. It was all in slow-motion: the thud of hammer to skewer and crack of skewer through wall and Setsuna somewhere in between with fist in mouth to prevent crying out, knuckles bitten and white. Kira stopped while threading the last earring to wonder why he knew that smell on the air: he recognised it as _burning flesh, of course_, and then tried to work out what the 'of course' was about it. Eventually, he threw the idea away as unviable and clicked the thin strip of metal into place almost idly: coming away from the ear his hand collided with something soft and warm and he realised his palm was flat against Setsuna's left cheek.

Setsuna's eyes were crinkled around the edges in a wince, and the suspicion of tears shone on each iris. Something more than pity crept upon Kira, and he brushed it away hurriedly with the saltwater from Setsuna's cheekboness.

"What are you - some sort of fucking _baby_? Stop crying." There was something else Kira was supposed to say, something that had been written down for him on an autocue he could not see and now the producer was shouting through the speaker in his ear. Kira blinked, confused, and let the blink last into a long moment's darkness: he finally opened his eyes, and turned up to him was Setsuna's face, flushed with pain and alcohol.

_Mine_, claimed the knowledge at the back of Kira's brain, and Kira did not deny it.

  


_Intellectual property of harpy_elian, December 2001_


End file.
